<<< Table of Contents >>>

In the discussions of the last chapter the word "consciousness" was avoided. It is a word of unsettled signification. Even apart from ambiguities in interpretation, there is no consensus as to what things the word denotes. Two quite different affairs are usually designated by it. On the one hand, it is employed to point out certain qualities in their immediate apparency, qualities of things of sentiency, such as are, from the psychological standpoint, usually termed feelings. The sum total of these immediate qualities present as literal ends or closures of natural processes constitute "consciousness" as an anoetic occurrence. This is consciousness wherever meanings do not exist; that is to say, apart from the existence and employment of signs, or independently of communication. On the other hand, consciousness is used to denote meanings actually perceived, awareness of objects: being wide-awake, alert, attentive to the significance of events, present, past, future. It is a lexicographic matter, which will not be discussed, whether the word should be employed to denote two such different affairs. What is important is that the difference in the nature of the things denoted should be registered, and that false ingenuity should not be expended in reducing one to the other.

Our previous discussion enables us, it will appear, to place the two denotations. The existential starting point is immediate qualities. Even meanings taken not as meanings but as existential are grounded in immediate qualities, in sentiencies or "feelings," of organic activities and receptivities. Meanings do not come into being without language, and language implies two selves involved in a conjoint or shared undertaking. Thus while its direct mechanism is found in the vocalizing and auditory apparatuses, this mechanism is in alliance with general organic behavior. Otherwise it becomes a mechanical routine not differing from the "speech" of parrot or a phonographic record. This alliance supplies language with the immediate qualitative "feel" that marks off signs immediately from one another in existence.

The same considerations define the "subconscious" of human thinking. Apart from language, from imputed and inferred meaning, we continually engage in an immense multitude of immediate organic selections, rejections, welcomings, expulsions, appropriations, withdrawals, shrinkings, expansions, elations and dejections, attacks, wardings off, of the most minute, vibratingly delicate nature. We are not aware of the qualities of many or most of these acts; we do not objectively distinguish and identify them. Yet they exist as feeling qualities, and have an enormous directive effect on our behavior. If for example, certain sensory qualities of which we are not cognitively aware cease to exist, we cannot stand or control our posture and movements. In a thoroughly normal organism, these "feelings" have an efficiency of operation which it is impossible for thought to match. Even our most highly intellectualized operations depend upon them as a "fringe" by which to guide our inferential movements. They give us our sense of Tightness and wrongness, of what to select and emphasize and follow up, and what to drop, slur over and ignore, among the multitude of inchoate meanings that are presenting themselves. They give us premonitions of approach to acceptable meanings, and warnings of getting off the track. Formulated discourse is mainly but a selected statement of what we wish to retain among all these incipient starts, following ups and breakings off. Except as a reader, a hearer repeats something of these organic movements, and thus "gets" their qualities, he does not get the sense of what is said; he does not really assent, even though he give cold approbation. These qualities are the stuff of "intuitions" and in actuality the difference between an "intuitive" and an analytic person is at most a matter of degree, of relative emphasis. The "reasoning" person is one who makes his "intuitions" more articulate, more deliverable in speech, as explicit sequence of initial premises, jointures, and conclusions.

Meanings acquired in connection with the use of tools and of language exercise a profound influence upon organic feelings. In the reckoning of this account, are included the changes effected by all the consequences of attitude and habit due to all the consequences of tools and language-in short, civilization. Evil communications corrupt (native) good manners of action, and hence pervert feeling and subconsciousness. The deification of the subconscious is legitimate only for those who never indulge in it-animals and thoroughly healthy naive children- if there be any such. The subconscious of a civilized adult reflects all the habits he has acquired; that is to say, all the organic modifications he has undergone. And in so far as these involve mal-coordinations, fixations and segregations (as they assuredly come to do in a very short time for those living in complex "artificial" conditions), sensory appreciation is confused, perverted and falsified. It is most reliable in just those activities with respect to which it is least spoken of, and least reliable with respect to those things where it is fashionable most to laud it. That is, it operates most successfully in meanings associated with language that is highly technical, affairs remote from fundamental and exigent needs, as in mathematics, or philosophizing far away from concrete situations, or in a highly cultivated fine art. It is surest to be wrong in connection with intimate matters of self-regulation in health, morals, social affairs-in matters most closely connected with basic needs and relationships. Where its use is popularly recommended it is most dangerous. To use feelings which are not the expression of a rectitude of organic action, rectitude that in civilized or artificial conditions is acquired only by taking thought (taking thought is radically different to just "thinking"), is to act like an animal without having the structural facilities of animal life. It has the fascination of all easy surrender to fatality and may be eulogized as a return to nature, spontaneity, or to the quasi-divine. It has the charm of lazy and comfortable escape from responsibility; we die, but we die, like animals, upon the field, defeated and mayhap disheartened, but without knowing it.

In a practical sense, here is the heart of the mind-body problem. Activities which develop, appropriate and enjoy meanings bear the same actualizing relation to psycho-physical affairs that the latter bear to physical characters. They present the consequences of a wider range of interactions, that in which needs, efforts and satisfactions conditioned by association are operative. In this widened and deepened activity, there are both added resources and values, and added liabilities and defaults. The actualization of meanings furnishes psycho-physical qualities with their ulterior significance and worth. But it also confuses and perverts them. The effects of this corruption are themselves embodied through habits in the psycho-physical, forming one-sided degraded and excessive susceptibilities; creating both disassociations and rigid fixations in the sensory register. These habitual effects become in turn spontaneous,natural, "instinctive;" they form the platform of development and apprehension of further meanings, affecting every subsequent phase of personal and social life.1

Thus while the psycho-physical in man, apart from conscious meaning achieves nothing distinguished, the casual growth and incorporation of meanings cause the native need, adjustment and satisfaction to lose their immediate certainty and efficiency, and become subject to all kinds of aberrations. There then occur systematized withdrawals from intercourse and interaction, from what common sense calls "reality": carefully cultivated and artificially protected fantasies of consolation and compensation; rigidly stereotyped beliefs not submitted to objective tests; habits of learned ignorance or systematized ignorings of concrete relationships; organized fanaticisms; dogmatic traditions which socially are harshly intolerant and which intellectually are institutionalized para-noic systems; idealizations which instead of being immediate enjoyments of meanings, cut man off from nature and his fellows.

In short, there is constituted what Walter Lippmann has well termed a secondary pseudo-environment, which affects every item of traffic and dealing with the primary environment. Thus the concrete problems of mind-body have their locus and import in the educational procedures by which a normal integration of meanings in organic functions shall be secured and perversions prevented; in the remedial operations of psychiatry, and in social arts and appliances that render intercourse substantial, balanced and flexible.

While on the psycho-physical level, consciousness denotes the totality of actualized immediate qualitative differences, or "feelings," it denotes, upon the plane of mind, actualized apprehensions of meanings, that is, ideas. There is thus an obvious difference between mind and consciousness; meaning and an idea. Mind denotes the whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of organic life; consciousness in a being with language denotes awareness or perception of meanings; it is the perception of actual events, whether past, contemporary or future, in their meanings, the having of actual ideas. The greater part of mind is only implicit in any conscious act or state; the field of mind-of operative meanings-is enormously wider than that of consciousness. Mind is contextual and persistent; consciousness is focal and transitive. Mind is, so to speak, structural, substantial; a constant background and foreground; perceptive consciousness is process, a series of heres and nows. Mind is a constant luminosity; consciousness intermittent, a series of flashes of varying intensities. Consciousness is, as it were, the occasional interception of messages continually transmitted, as a mechanical receiving device selects a few of the vibrations with which the air is filled and renders them audible.

The nature of awareness of meanings cannot be conveyed in speech. As with other immediate qualitative existences, words can only hint, point; the indication succeeding when it evokes an actual experience of the thing in question. Such words as apparency, conspicuousness, outstandingness, vividness, clearness, including of course their opposites vague, dim, confused, may assist the evocation. To denote the characteristics of mind a thoroughly different set of names must be used: organization, order, coherence. The relation of mind to consciousness may be partially suggested by saying that while mind as a system of meanings is subject to disorganization, disequilibration, perturbation, there is no sense in referring to a particular state of awareness in its immediacy as either organized or disturbed. An idea is just what it is when it occurs. To call it composed or perturbed is to compare one state with another, a comparison which by nature of the case can be made only indirectly on the basis of respective conditions and consequences. Emotional conditions do not occur as emotions, intrinsically denned as such; they occur as"tertiary" qualities of objects. Some cases of awareness or perception are designated "emotions*''in retrospect or from without, as a child is instructed to term certain perceptual situations anger, or fear, or love, by way of informing him as to their consequences. Immediately, every perceptual awareness may be termed indifferently emotion, sensation, thought, desire: not that it is immediately any one of these things, or all of them combined, but that when it is taken in some reference, to conditions or to consequences or to both, it has, in that contextual reference, the distinctive properties of emotion, sensation, thought or desire.

The relation between mind and consciousness may be indicated by a familiar happening. When we read a book, we are immediately conscious of meanings that present themselves, and vanish. These meanings exis-tentially occurring are ideas. But we are capable of getting ideas from what is read because of an organized system of meanings of which we are not at any one time completely aware. Our mathematical or political "mind" is the system of such meanings as possess and determine our particular apprehensions or ideas. There is however, a continuum or spectrum between this containing system and the meanings which, being focal and urgent, are the ideas of the moment. There is a contextual field between the latter and those meanings which determine the habitual direction of our conscious thoughts and supply the organs for their formation. One great mistake in the orthodox psychological tradition is its exclusive preoccupation with sharp focalization to the neglect of the vague shading off from the foci into a field of increasing dimness.

Discrimination in favor of the clearly distinguished has a certain practical justification, for the vague and extensive background is present in every conscious experience and therefore does not define the character of any one in particular. It represents that which is being used and taken for granted, while the focal phase is that which is imminent and critical. But this fact affords no justification for neglect and denial in theory of the dim and total background consciousness of every distinct thought. If there were a sharp division between the ideas that are focal as we read a certain section of a book and what we have already read, if there were not carried along a sense of the latter, what we now read could not take the form of an idea. Indeed, the use of such words as context and background, fringe, etc., suggests something too external to meet the facts of the case. The larger system of meaning suffuses, interpenetrates, colors what is now and here uppermost; it gives them sense, feeling, as distinct from signification.

Change the illustration from reading a book to seeing and hearing a drama. The emotional as well as intellectual meaning of each presented phase of a play depends upon the operative presence of a continuum of meanings. If we have to remember what has been said and done at any particular point, we are not aware of what is now said and done; while without its suffusive presence in what is now said and done we lack clew to its meaning. Thus the purport of past affairs is present in the momentary cross-sectional idea in a way which is more intimate, direct and pervasive than the way of recall. It is positively and integrally carried in and by the incidents now happening; these incidents are, in the degree of genuine dramatic quality, fulfillment of the meanings constituted by past events; they also give this system of meanings an unexpected turn, and constitute a suspended and still indeterminate meaning, which induces alertness, expectancy. It is this double relationship of continuation, promotion, carrying forward, and of arrest, deviation, need of supplementation, which defines that focalization of meanings which is consciousness, awareness, perception. Every case of consciousness is dramatic; drama is an enhancement of the conditions of consciousness.

It is impossible to tell what immediate consciousness is-not because there is some mystery in or behind it, but for the same reason that we cannot tell just what sweet or red immediately is: it is something had, not communicated and known. But words, as means of directing action, may evoke a situation in which the thing in question is had in some particularly illuminating way. It seems to me that anyone who installs himself in the midst of the unfolding of drama has the experience of consciousness in just this sort of way; in a way which enables him to give significance to descriptive and analytic terms otherwise meaningless. There must be a story, some whole, an integrated series of episodes. This connected whole is mind, as it extends beyond a particular process of consciousness and conditions it. There must also be now-occurring events, to which meanings are assigned in terms of a story taking place. Episodes do not mean what they would mean if occurring in some different story. They have to be perceived in terms of the story, as its forwardings and fulfillings. At the same time, until the play or story is ended, meanings given to events are of a sort which constantly evoke a meaning which was not absolutely anticipated or totally predicted: there is expectancy, but also surprise, novelty. As far as complete and assured prediction is possible, interest in the play lags; it ceases to be an observed drama, it is not subsequently in consciousness.

An oft-told tale repeated without change fails to engage perception; it liberates us for attention to another story where development of meanings is as yet incomplete and indeterminate, possessed of suspense and uncertainty. Thus while perceptions are existentially intermittent and discrete, like a series of signal flashes, or telegraphic clicks, yet they involve a continuum of meaning in process of formation. If we became convinced that a succession of flashes or clicks were not a series of terms with respect to one and the same unfolding meaning, we should not attend to them or be aware of them. If on the other hand, there are no variations to compel suspense, no unforseen movement in a new direction; if there is one unbroken luminosity, or one unbroken monotony of sound, there is no perception, no consciousness.

These considerations enable us to give a formal definition of consciousness in relation to mind or meanings. Consciousness, an idea, is that phase of a system of meanings which at a given time is undergoing re-direction, transitive transformation. The current idealistic conception of consciousness as a power which modifies events, is an inverted statement of this fact. To treat consciousness as a power accomplishing the change, is but another instance of the common philosophic fallacy of converting an eventual function into an antecedent force or cause. Consciousness is the meaning of events in course of remaking; its "cause" is only the fact that this is one of the ways in which nature goes on. In a proximate sense of causality, namely as place in a series history, its causation is the need and demand for filling out what is indeterminate.

There is a counterpart realist doctrine, according to which consciousness is like the eye running over a field of ready-made objects, or a light which illuminates now this and now that portion of a given field. These analogies ignore the indeterminateness of meaning when there is awareness; they fail to consider a basic consideration, namely, that while there exists an antecedent stock of meanings, these are just the ones which we take for granted and use: the ones of which we are not and do not need to be conscious. The theory takes as the normal case of consciousness the case where there is a minimum of doubt and inquiry; the case where objects are most familiar and current, and so to speak vouch directly for themselves. It finds consciousness exemplified in being aware of old and often used things (the articles of furniture which figure in most discussions of consciousness) rather than in case of thinking where reflective inquiry is needed in order to arrive at a meaning. It postulates, even though only implicitly, a pre-established harmony of the knower and things known, passing over the fact that such harmony is always an attained outcome of prior inferences and investigations. It assumes a knowing mind wholly guileless, and extraordinarily competent, whose sole business is to behold and register objects just as what they are, and which is unswervingly devoted to its business.

It is hard to believe that such an amiable and optimistic view of the nature of mind could have obtained currency, had it not been for a theology according to which God is perfect mind and man is created in the image of his maker. Even so, however, it could hardly have persisted when science displaced theology, had not science provided a number of cases which satisfy the requirement of the theory, and thereby given it a kind of empirical content and basis. That is, the development of science does present (a) the rise of cognitional interest to a point of prestige, and (b) it supplies eventually many cases of valid cognitive perceptions. Those who concern themselves with inquiry into the nature of consciousness have a strongly developed intellectual interest; this makes it easy for them to postulate a universal concern in knowing objects as the very essence of mind. These persons have rectitude of cognitive bent, acquired through scientific training; and they with ready benevolence, confer similar rectitude upon perception universally. Then when the existence of error, mistake, dreams, hallucinations, etc. is recognized, these things are treated as deviations and exceptions from the normal, to be accounted for by the introduction of complicating factors.

The problem and its solution thus become essentially dialectical. For empirical facts indicate that not error but truth is the exception, the thing to be accounted for, and that the attainment of truth is the outcome of the development of complex and elaborate methods of searching, methods that while congenial to some men in some respects, in many respects go against the human grain, so that they are adopted only after long discipline in a school of hard knocks. Even to put the matter in terms of proportion of erroneous and true perceptions, is to fail to see the chief objection to the theory. For it postulates the primarily cognitive character of awareness or perception. Empirically, however, the characteristic thing about perceptions in their natural estate, apart from subjection to an art of knowing, is their irrelevance to both truth and error; they exist for the most part in another dimension, whose nature may be suggested by reference to imagination, fancy, reverie, affection, love and hate, desire, happiness and misery. This fact, more than the error-problem, proves the artificial character of the spectator, search-light, notion of consciousness.

Empirical evidence in support of the proposition that consciousness of meanings denotes redirection of meanings (which are always ultimately meanings of events) is supplied by obvious facts of attention and interest on one side, and the working of established and assured habits on the other. The familiar does not consciously appear, save in an unexpected, novel, situation, where the familiar presents itself in a new light and is therefore not wholly familiar. Our deepest-seated habits are precisely those of which we have least awareness. When they operate in a situation to which they are not accustomed, in an unusual situation, a new adjustment is required. Hence there is shock, and an -accompanying perception of dissolving and reforming meaning. Attention is most alert and stretched, when, because of unusual situations, there is great concern about the issue, together with suspense as to what it will be. We are engaged at once in taking in what is happening and looking ahead to what has not yet happened. As far as we can count upon the contemporary conditions and upon their outcome, focalization of meaning is absent. That which is taken to be involved in any event, in every issue, no matter what, we are not aware of. If we consider the entire field from bright focus through the fore-conscious, the "fringe," to what is dim, sub-conscious "feeling," the focus corresponds to the point of imminent need, of urgency; the "fringe" corresponds to things that just have been reacted to or that will soon require to be looked after, while the remote outlying field corresponds to what does not have to be modified, and which may be dependably counted upon in dealing with imminent need.

Hence the proverbial disparity between things in the scale of consciousness and in the scale of consequences is the most conclusive refutation of subjective idealism. The power of a momentary annoyance or flitting amusement to distract a personage from an enduringly serious question is a familiar theme of comedy; a glass of wine or the whine of a mosquito may exclude issues of life and death. Any trivial thing may swell and swell, if it bothers us. To like effect are the standing complaints of moralists that men sacrifice the great good to the lesser, if the latter be close at hand; and their proclamation that reason and freedom are only found when the near-by and the remote good are weighed with equal balance. Tragedy gives the same testimony. While doom impends the tragic hero fatally pursues his way, unheeding of the web closing in upon him, obvious to all others, and oblivious of what should be done to avert destructive destiny.

The immediately precarious, the point of greatest immediate need, defines the apex of consciousness, its intense or focal mode. And this is the point of re-direction, of re-adaptation, re-organization. Hence the aptness of James's comparison of the course of consciousness to a stream, in spite of its intermittent character-a fact empirically recognized in his intimation of its rhythmic waxings and wanings-; of his insistence that only an object, not a concrete consciousness which is had twice, or which remains the same; of his analogy of focus and fringe; of his statement of its movements as a series of perchings and flights, of substantial and transitive phases; formean-ings are condensed at the focus of imminent re-direction only to disappear as organization is effected, and yield place to another point of stress and weakness.

Empirical confirmation of this conception of consciousness is found in the extreme instability of every perceived object; the impossibility of excluding rapid and subtle change, except at the cost of inducing hypnotic sleep; the passage from being wide awake, awake, drowsy, dreaming and fast asleep, according as an organism is actively partaking, or abstaining from partaking, in the course of events. All that goes by the name of "relativity" of consciousness is to precisely the same effect, including the Weberian principle; perceived changes are those which require a redirection of adaptive behavior. A prior adaptation constitutes a threshold (better called a platform or plateau); what is consciously noted is alteration of one plateau; re-adjustment to another. Similar events may mean cold at one time or place and warmth at another, depending upon the direction of organic re-adaptation. Even a tooth-ache is unstable in consciousness for it is notoriously a matter of throbs, pulsations, palpitations, waxings and wanings of intensity, of organic protests and temporary deviations, and of enforced returns-of flights and perchings. The "tooth-ache" which does not change is not the perceived tooth-ache, but the cognitive object, the unperceived tooth to which the sequence of all changes is referred.

Confirmation of the hypothesis is found in the fact that wherever perceptual awareness occurs, there is a "moment" of hesitation; there are scruples, reservations, in complete overt action. It seems quite probable that men of the executive type are those of the least subtle and variegated perceptual field; of the lowest degree of consciousness, having the steepest threshold to be crossed in order to induce a state of awareness. We have to "stop and think," and we do not stop unless there is interference. The flood of action at high tide overrides all but the most considerable obstructions. It flows too forcibly and rapidly in one direction to be checked; without inhibition there are no hesitations, crises, alternatives, need of re-direction. Overt action is an enstate-ment of established organic-environmental integrations. As long as these can maintain themselves, they do so; there is then no opportunity for transforming meaning into idea. In completely integrated function there is no room for distinction between things signifying and things signified. Only when behavior is divided within itself, do some of its factors have a subject-matter which stands for present tendencies and for their requirements or indications and implications, while others factors stand for absent and remote objects which, in unifying and organizing activity, complete the meaning of what is given at hand. The readier a response, the less consciousness, meaning, thinking it permits; division introduces mental confusion, but also, in need for redirection, opportunity for observation, recollection, anticipation.

There is then an empirical truth in the common opposition between theory and practice, between the contemplative, reflective type and the executive type, the "go-getter," the kind that "gets things done." It is, however, a contrast between two modes of practice. One is the pushing, slam-bang, act-first and think-afterwards mode, to which events may yield as they give way to any strong force. The other mode is wary, observant, sensitive to slight hints and intimations; perhaps intriguing, timid in public and ruthless in concealed action; perhaps over-cautious and inhibited, unduly subject to scruples, hesitancies, an ineffective Hamlet in performance; or perhaps achieving a balance between immediately urgent demands and remoter consequences, consistent and cumulative in action. In the latter case, there develops a field of perception, rich in hues and subtle in shades of meaning. In the degree in which this occurs, overt action is subordinated to the contribution it renders to sustaining and developing the scope of the conscious field. One lives on a conscious plane; thought guides activity, and perception is its reward. Action is not suppressed but is moderated. Like the scientific experimenter, one acts not just to act, nor rashly, nor automatically, but with a consciousness of purpose and for the sake of learning. Intellectual hesitations and reservations are used to expand and enrich the field of perception, by means of rendering activity more delicate, and discriminatingly adapted.

The notion that highly thoughtful persons are incompetent in action has its proper corrective in another attitude of belief which is expressed in such words as these: "No one can make you see this point; but unless you do see it, you won't change your conduct; if you do get the point you will act differently." The first notion, that thought paralyzes, refers to action in gross, the second relates to change in quality of action. Carry to an extreme the experiences indicated by the first proposition, and the result is the so-called automaton or epiphenomenal theory of consciousness; perception is an idle and superficial attachment to a mechanical play of energies. Carry the experiences involved in the other saying to an extreme, and you have the doctrine of the original creativeness of consciousness; it makes objects what they are.

Empirically the situation stands about like this: The use or intent of instruction, advice, admonition, and honest dialectic is to bring to awareness meanings hitherto unperceived, thereby constituting their ideas. The entanglements, misunderstandings and compromised understandings of life are a sufficient commentary on the difficulties in the way of realizing this intent. But experience demonstrates that as far as it is accomplished, conduct is actually changed; to get a new meaning is perforce to be in a new attitude. This does not indicate that consciousness or perception is an entity which makes the difference. What follows is that perception or consciousness is, literally, the difference in process of making. Instruction and reproof that are not an idle flogging of the air involve an art of re-directing activity; given this redirection and there is emergence of change in meanings, or perception. There is here no question of priority or causal sequence; intentional change in direction of events is transforming change in the meaning of those events. We have at present little or next to no controlled art of securing that redirection of behavior which constitutes adequate perception or consciousness. That is, we have little or no art of education in the fundamentals, namely in the management of the organic attitudes which color the qualities of our conscious objects and acts.

As long as our chief psycho-physical coordinations are formed blindly and in the dark during infancy and early childhood, they are accidental adjustments to the pressure of other persons and of circumstances which act upon us. They do not then take into account the consequence of these activities upon formation of habits and habitua-tions. Hence the connection between consciousness and action is precarious, and its possession a doubtful boon as compared with the efficacy of instinct-or structure-in lower animals. Energy is wasteful and misdirected; in the outcome we effect the opposite of what we intended. Consciousness is desultory and casual. Only when organic activity achieves a conscious plane shall we be adequately aware of what we are about. As long as our own fundamental psycho-physical attitudes in dealing with external things are subconscious, our conscious attention going only to the relations of external things, so long will our perception of the external situations be subject at its root to perversion and vitiation. This state of affairs is the source of that apparent disconnection between consciousness and action which strikes us when we begin to reflect. The connecting links between the two are in our own attitudes; while they remain unperceived, consciousness and behavior must appear to be independent of each other. Hence there will be empirical reason for isolating consciousness from natural events. When so isolated, some persons will assert that consciousness is a slavish and capricious shadow of things and others will proclaim that it is their rightful creator and master. Assertions, like those of this discussion, that consciousness is their recognized meaning when they are undergoing purposeful re-direction by means of organic activity will seem to lack full empirical evidence.

It remains to note and deal with two difficulties that have quite probably troubled the reader. In the first place, the discussion has explicitly gone on the basis that what is perceived are meanings, rather than just events or existences. In this respect, the view presented agrees with classic teaching, according to which perception, apprehension, lays hold of form, not of matter. I believe this view properly understood is inherently sound; the error in the classic theory lies in its accompanying assumption that all perceptions are intrinsically cognitive. In the second place, the identification of consciousness with perceptive awareness runs counter to the verbal usage of recent psychology and philosophy which limits perception to apprehension (usually valid) of contemporaneously occurring events in "real" space. The latter issue however is not just a matter of propriety of language-about which it would be absurd to argue. It involves the conviction that perception of real things now existing differs inherently from other modes of consciousness, such as emotion, thinking, remembering, fancy and imagination. For this conviction, it must be explicitly noted, is contradicted by the conception which has been stated. According to the latter every mode of awareness-as distinct from "feeling"-in its immediate existence is exactly the same sort of thing, namely a remaking of meanings of events. The difference, it is implied, between awareness of present and "real" things and of absent and unreal is extrinsic, not intrinsic to a consciousness. The sequel will reveal that these two points are intimately connected with each other.

When it is denied that we are conscious of events as such it is not meant that we are not aware of objects. Objects are precisely what we are aware of. For objects are events with meanings; tables, the milky way, chairs, stars, cats, dogs, electrons, ghosts, centaurs, historic epochs and all the infinitely multifarious subject-matter of discourse designable by common nouns, verbs and their qualifiers. So intimate is the connection of meanings with consciousness that there is no great difficulty in resolving "consciousness," as a recent original and ingenious thinker has done, into knots, intersections or complexes of universals.8

Serious difficulty sets in however when events are resolved into such combinations. The matter is referred to here not to be argued; but to indicate that a "realist" has gone even further than the theory now presented goes in identifying the subject-matter of which there is awareness with meanings, or at least with universals which, as simple subject-matter, colors, sounds, etc., and complex, plants, animals, atoms, etc., are precisely the same as meanings. To cause existences in their particularity to disappear into combinations of universals is at least an extreme measure. And the present thesis sticks to the common-sense belief that universals, relations, meanings, are of and about existences, not their exhaustive ingredients. The same existential events are capable of an infinite number of meanings. Thus an existence identified as "paper," because the meaning uppermost at the moment is "something to be written upon," has as many other explicit meanings as it has important consequences recognized in the various connective interactions into which it enters. Since possibilities of conjunction are endless, and since the consequences of any of them may at some tune be significant, its potential meanings are en Hess. It signifies something to start a fire with; something like snow; made of wood-pulp; manufactured for profit; property in the legal sense; a definite combination illustrative of certain principles of chemical science; an article the invention of which has made a tremendous difference in human history, ani so on indefinitely. There is no conceivable universe of discourse in which the thing may not figure, having in each its own characteristic meaning. And if we say that after all it is "paper" which has all these different meanings, we are at bottom but asserting that all the different meanings have a common existential reference, converging to the same event. We are virtually asserting that the existence whose usual, standardized meaning in discourse is paper, also has a multitude of other meanings; we are saying in effect that its existence is not exhausted in its being paper, although paper is its ordinary meaning for human intercourse.

Ghosts, centaurs, tribal gods, Helen of Troy and Ophelia of Denmark are as much the meanings of events as are flesh and blood, horses, Florence Nightingale and Madam Curie. This statement does not mark a discovery; it enunciates a tautology. It seems questionable only when its significance is altered; when it is taken to denote that, because they are all meanings of events, they all are the same kind of meaning with respect to validity of reference. Because perception of a ghost does not signify a subtle, intangible form, filling space as it moves about, it does not follow that it may not signify some other existential happening like disordered nerves; a religious animistic tradition; or, as in the play of Hamlet, that it may not signify an enhancement of the meaning of a moving state of affairs. The existential events that form a drama have their own characteristic meanings, which are not the less meanings of those events because their import is dramatic, not authentically cognitive. So when men gather in secret to plot a conspiracy, their plans are not the less meanings of certain events because they have not been already carried out; and they remain meanings of events even if the conspiracy comes to naught.

The proposition that the perception of a horse is objectively valid and that of a centaur fanciful and mythical does not denote that one is a meaning of natural events and the other is not. It denotes that they are meanings referable to different natural events, and that confused and harmful consequences result from attributing them to the same events. The idea that the consciousness of a horse as now present and of a centaur differ as perceptions, or states of awareness, is an illustration of the harm wrought by introspective psychology, which, here as elsewhere, treats relationships of objects as if they were inherent qualities of an immediate subject-matter, ignoring the fact that causal relationships to unperceived things are involved. The matter of the cognitive validity of the horse-perception and the cognitive invalidity of the centaur-perception is not an affair of intrinsic difference in the two perceptions, which inspection of the two states of awareness as such can ever bring to light; it is a causal matter, brought to light as we investigate the causal antecedents and consequents of the events having the meanings.

In other words, the difference between assertion of a perception, belief in it, and merely having it is an extrinsic difference; the belief, assertion, cognitive reference is something additive, never merely immediate. Genuinely to believe the centaur-meaning is to assert that events characterized by it interact in certain ways with other now unperceived events. Since belief that centaur has the same kind of objective meaning as has horse denotes expectation of like efficacies and consequences, the difference of validity between them is extrinsic. It is capable of being revealed only by the results of acting upon them. The awareness of centaur meaning is fanciful not simply because part of its conditions lie within the organism; part of the conditions of any perception, valid as well as invalid, scientific as well as esthetic, lie within the organism. Nor is it fanciful, simply because it is supposed not to have adequate existential antecedents. Natural conditions, physiological, physical and social, may be specified in one case as in the other. But since the conditions in the two cases are different, consequences are bound to be different. Knowing, believing, involves something additive and extrinsic to having a meaning.

No knowledge is ever merely immediate. The proposition that the perception of a horse is valid and that a centaur is fanciful or hallucinatory, does not denote that there are two modes of awareness, differing intrinsically from each other. It denotes something with respect to causation, namely, that while both have their adequate antecedent conditions, the specific causal conditions are ascertained to be different in the two cases. Hence it denotes something with respect to consequences, namely, that action upon the respective meanings will bring to light (to apparency or awareness) such different kinds of consequences that we should use the two meanings in very different ways. Both acts and consequences lie outside the primary perceptions; both have to be diligently sought for and tested. Since conditions in the two cases are different, they operate differently. That is, they belong to different histories, and the matter of the history to which a given thing belongs is just the matter with which knowledge is concerned. The conscious or perceived affair is itself a consequence of antecedent conditions. But were this conscious or apparent (evident, focal) consequence the only consequence of the conditions, if there were not other as yet unapparent consequences, we should have absolutely no way to tell in what sequence of events a perception belongs, and hence absolutely no way of determining its validity or cognitive standing. It is because conditions which generate the perception of a horse have other and different consequences than the perception (and similarly of those which generate the idea of the centaur), that it is possible to make a distinction between the value in knowledge of the two ideas. By discovering the different sequential affairs to which they respectively belong we can differentiate their import for knowledge. Failure to recognize this fact is the ultimate condemnation, it may be remarked in passing, of idealistic theories of knowledge, which identify it with immediate consciousness. If an all-inclusive consciousness were to exist, it would be a piece of esthetic scenery, interesting or tedious as the case might be, but having no conceivable cognitive standing.

That a perception is cognitive means, accordingly, that it is used; it is treated as a sign of conditions that implicate other as yet unperceived consequences in addition to the perception itself. That a perception is truly cognitive means that its active use or treatment is followed by consequences which fit appropriately into the other consequences which follow independently of its being perceived. To discover that a perception or an idea is cognitively invalid is to find that the consequences which follow from acting upon it entangle and confuse the other consequences which follow from the causes of the perception, instead of integrating or coordinating harmoniously with them. The special technique of scientific inquiry may be defined as consisting of procedures which make it possible to perceive the eventual agreement or disagreement of the two sets of consequences. For experience proves that it is possible for great disparity between them to exist, and yet the conflict not be perceived or else be explained away as of no importance.

Common-sense has no great occasion to distinguish between bare events and objects; objects being events-with-meanings. Events are present and operative anyway; what concerns us is their meanings expressed in expectations, beliefs, inferences, regarding their potentialities. The nearest approach that occurs in ordinary life to making the distinction is when there occurs some brute, dumb shock, which we are constrained to interpret, to assign meaning to, that is, to convert into an object. Such situations supply direct empirical evidence of the difference between events and objects; but common-sense does not need to formulate the difference as a distinction. Events have effects or consequences anyway; and since meaning is awareness of these consequences before they actually occur, reflective inquiry which converts an event into an object is the same thing as finding out a meaning which the event already possesses by imputation. It is the essence of common sense, one might say, to treat potentialities as given actualities; since its interest is universally practical, bent upon fruitage, there is no need to note its bent hi any particular case. The eventual outcome is for it the "reality" of the present situation.

But not so with philosophic discourse. Philosophy must explicitly note that the business of reflection is to take events which brutely occur and brutely affect us, to convert them into objects by means of inference as to their probable consequences. These are the meanings imputed to the events under consideration. Otherwise philosophy finds itself hi a hopeless impasse. For, apart from making a distinction between events and objects, it has no way of differentiating cognitive from esthetic and literary meanings, and within cognitive meanings it has no way of distinguishing the valid from the invalid. The outcome of failure in this respect is exemplified in those discussions which find an inherent and generic cognitive problem in the occurrence of dreams, reveries and hallucinations, a problem other than the scientific one of ascertaining their antecedents and effects. For if intrinsic cognitive intent is ascribed to all perceptions, or forms of awareness, which are alleged to pick out a "reality" to which they refer as an image or sign, dreams, etc., have to be squared to this assumption. Draw the distinction between events and objects, and dream-objects are just what they are, events with one kind of meaning, while scientific-objects are just what they are, events with another kind of meaning, a kind that involves an extrinsic and additive function not contained in dream-objects.

In formulating the distinction between existences and objects of reference, whether cognitive, esthetic or moral, philosophy does not exact that violent break with common sense which is found in the assertion of idealism that events themselves are composed of meanings. Nor does it involve that break with common sense found in episte-mological realism, with its assertion of a direct dealing of mind with naked existences unclothed by the intervention of meanings. Philosophy has only to state, to make explicit, the difference between events which are challenges to thought and events which have met the challenge and hence possess meaning. It has only to note that bare occurrence in the way of having, being, or undergoing is the provocation and invitation to thought- seeking and finding unapparent connections, so that thinking terminates when an object is present: namely, when a challenging event is endowed with stable meanings through relationship to something extrinsic but connected.

There is nothing new in the facts contained in this statement. It was an axiom of the classic theory that form, not matter, is the object of knowledge. And many other theories, in spite of the violence with which they nominally protest against the statement that existences as such are not the objects of knowledge, contain the essential facts, though in an incredible form. It is straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel to balk at the proposition that we mentally are concerned with events in their meanings and not in themselves, and at the same time to welcome the proposition that the immediate objects of all consciousness are sensations and complexes of sensations, termed images or ideas. For if by sensations (or by sensa) is meant not mere shocks in feeling, but something qualitative and capable of objective reference, then sensations are but one class of meanings. They are a class of meanings which embody the mature results of elaborate experimental inquiry in tracing out causal dependencies and relationships. This inquiry depends upon prior possession of a system of meanings, physical theories of light, sound, etc., and of knowledge of nervous structures and functions.

The alleged primacy of sensory meanings is mythical. They are primary only in logical status; they are primary as tests and confirmation of inferences concerning matters of fact, not as historic originals. For, while it is not usually needful to carry the check or test of theoretical calculations to the point of irreducible sensa, colors, sounds, etc., these sensa form a limit approached in careful analytic certifications, and upon critical occasions it is necessary to touch the limit. The transformation of these ulterior checking meanings into existential primary data is but another example of domination by interest in results and fruits, plus the fallacy which converts a functional office into an antecedent existence. Sensa are the class of irreducible meanings which are employed in verifying and correcting other meanings. We actually set out with much coarser and more inclusive meanings and not till we have met with failure from their use do we even set out to discover those ultimate and harder meanings which are sensory in character.

The theory that awareness is intrinsically possessed of cognitive reference and intent is Protean in the forms it has assumed in the history of thought. One of these forms, that knowledge is recognition, is worth special attention. The idea that the act of knowing is always one of recognizing or noting is certain to lead the mind astray; dialectically, it breaks upon the impossibility entailed of instituting an initial act of knowing; it commits its holder to a Platonic prior intuition in the realm of eternity. It is easy to see, however, how the idea suggested itself and gained credence. Recognition, identified and distinguished meaning, is an indispensable condition of effective experience. It is a prerequisite of successful practise; except in so far as the situation in which we are to act is distinguished as having a notable character, behavior is hopelessly at a loss. It is a prerequisite to an act of knowing; for without possession of a recognized meaning, there is nothing to know with; there is no indication of the direction inquiry has to take, or of the universe within which inquiry falls. But, recognition is not cognition. It is what the word implicitly conveys; re-cognition; not in the sense that an act of cognizing is repeated, but in the sense that there is a reminder of the meaning in which a former experience terminated, and which may be used as an acceptable tool in further activities.

Most theories of knowing which define a knowledge as an immediate noting seem at bottom to rest upon a confusion of widely differing acts: one that of taking cognizance, which means to pay heed to the apparent in terms of non-apparent consequences; and the other that of being re-minded of something previously known, which is then used in the act of true, inferential, cognition. Recognition is re-instatement of a meaning vouched for in some other situation, plus a sense of familiarity, of immediate greeting of welcome or aversion. It is exemplified in the experience of revisiting the scenes of childhood, with the emotional responses which familiar scenes evoke; it is found in the acknowledgments of the thoroughly practical man, who deferentially notes a character of existence as something which, as a practical man, he must take into account in planning his conduct. Recognition is a nod, either of voluntary piety or of coerced respect, not a knowing.

There is another theory which makes "acquaintance" the primary mode of knowledge, and which treats acquaintance-knowledge as wholly immediate. Acquaintance is empirically distinguished from knowing about a thing, and from knowing thai a thing is thus and so. It is genuinely cognitive. But it has its distinctive features because it involves something more than bare presence of an identified meaning; it involves expectancy which is an extrinsic reference; it involves a judgment as to what the object of acquaintance will do in connection with other events. To be acquainted with a man is at least to "know him by sight" as we truly say; it is to use a meaning conditioned by present vision to form a supposition about something not seen: how the man will behave under other circumstances than those of just being seen. To be acquainted with a man is to forecast his general life of conduct; it is to have insight into character. And insight, as distinct from sight, means that sight is employed to form inferences regarding what is not seen. It passes beyond apparition of meaning. The difference between acquaintance and "knowing about" or "knowing that" is genuine, but it is not a difference between two kinds of knowledge, one immediate and the other mediate. The difference is an affair of accompaniments, contexts and modes of response. The greater intimacy and directness that marks acquaintance is practical and emotional not logical. To be acquainted with anything is to have the kind of expectancy of its consequences which constitutes an immediate readiness to act, an adequate preparatory adjustment to whatever the thing in question may do. To know about it is to have a kind of knowledge which does not pass into direct response until some further term has been supplied. Direct readiness to act involves a sense of community; postponed readiness a sense of aloofness. Where there is acquaintance, there is an immediate emotion of participation in the situations hi which the object of acquaintance engages, sympathetic or antipathetic according as readiness takes the form of a disposition to favor or to hinder. Knowledge about a historic or literary figure passes into acquaintance when one arrives at a point of imaginative foresight of his prospective conduct and dramatically shares in it. Knowledge that the earth is round becomes acquaintance when, in some juncture of experience, the meaning comes home to us, as we say, or we get a "realizing sense" of it. Acquaintance, then, instead of being a mode of knowledge prior to knowledge about and knowledge that, marks a later stage in which the latter attain full sense and efficacy.

It follows that theories which identify knowledge with acquaintance, recognition, definition and classification give evidence, all the better for being wholly unintended, that we know not just events but events-with-meanings. To assert that knowledge is classification is to assert in effect that kind, character, has overlaid and over ridden bare occurrence and existence. To say that to know is to define is to recognize that wherever there is knowledge there is explicitly present a universal. To hold that cognition is recognition is to concede that likeness, a relation, rather than existence, is central. And to be acquainted with anything is to be aware what it is like, in what sort of ways it is likely to behave. These features, character, kind, sort, universal, likeness, fall within the universe of meaning. Hence the theories which make them constitutive of knowledge acknowledge that having meanings is a prerequisite for knowing. This prerequisite, being universally required, has loomed so large that thinkers have been led to slur over the concrete differential quality of knowledge-a particular act of taking, using, responding to, the meanings involved. That curious piece of traditional "analytic" psychology in accordance with which all knowing is a fusion or association of sensation with images is more testimony in the same direction; "associated imagery" being a round about equivalent of events with meaning.

Finally, the notion that knowledge is contemplation is likewise accounted for. To contemplate is consciously to possess meanings; to behold them with relish; to view them so absorbingly as to revel in them. It is a name for the perception of significant characters, plus an emphatic allusion to an accompanying esthetic emotion. Hypotheses which, like the one advanced in this book and chapter, hold that no knowing takes place without an overt act of taking and employing things on the basis of their meanings, have been attacked as over-devoted to keeping busy; as ignoring the place and charm of contemplation. Well, contemplation assuredly has a place. But when it is ultimate, and is a fruition, knowing has stepped out of the picture; the vision is esthetic. This may be better than knowing; but its being better is no reason for mixing different things and attributing to knowledge characters belonging to an esthetic object. Omit the esthetic phase, the absorbing charm of contemplation, and what remains for a theory of knowledge is that meanings must be had before they can be used as means of bringing to apparition meanings now obscure and hidden. If I were allowed to call to the witness stand but one historic theory to give testimony to prove that while there is no knowing without perception of meaning, yet that having meanings and rolling them over as sweet morsels under the tongue are not knowing, I should summon the venerable doctrine that knowledge is contemplation.

Another difficulty involved in the theory was mentioned; a difficulty contained in the fact that recent theories have limited the signification of perception. In its older usage, it designated any awareness, any "seeing" whether of objects, ideas, principles, conclusions or whatever. In recent literature it is usually restricted to "sense-perception." There can be no quarrel about the meaning of words except a lexicographical quarrel. The issue at stake concerns then not the appropriate use of a word; it concerns certain matters of fact which are implied or usually associated with the present restricted usage. These implications are two: First, there exists a mode of consciousness or awareness which is original, primitive, simple, and which refers immediately and intrinsically to things in space external to the organism at the time of perception. Secondly, this reference is originally, and ex proprio motu, cognitive. Now as against these implications, the theory which has been advanced asserts that awareness in the form of auditory and visual perception is, whenever it is cognitive, just as much a matter of inferential judgment, an instance of a way of taking and using meanings, as is any proposition found in the science of physics.

In its general features, argument as to this point is to the same effect as that of the point just discussed. But we may avoid repetition and introduce greater specification by confining ourselves to the factual traits characteristic of perceptions of present objects in space; showing that these, when they are cognitive, are highly selected and artful instances of awareness, not primitive and innocent. The current theory begins with a distinction between peripherally initiated and centrally initiated awareness. Peripheral initiation is the defining mark of such operations as are designated "perceptions." But awarenesses do not come to us labelled "I am caused by an event initiated on the surface of the body by other bodies"; and "I on the contrary originate in an intra-organic event only indirectly connected with surface-changes." The distinction is one made by analytic and classifying thought. This fact is enough to place in doubt the notion that some modes of consciousness are originally and intrinsically "sense-perception."

Moreover, there is no absolute separation between the skin and the interior of the body. No sooner is the distinction drawn than it has to be qualified. As a matter of fact there is no such thing as an exclusively peripherally initiated nervous event. Internal conditions, those of hunger, blood-circulation, endocrine functions, persistences of prior activities, pre-existent opened and blocked neuronic connections, together with a multitude of other intra-organic factors enter into the determination of a peripheral occurrence. And after the peripheral excitation has taken place, its subsequent career is not self-determined, but is affected by literally everything going on within the organism. It is pure fiction that a "sensation", or peripheral excitation, or stimulus, travels undisturbed in solitary state in its own coach-and-four to enter the brain or consciousness in its purity. A particular excitation is but one of an avalanche of contemporaneously occurring excitations, peripheral and from proprio-ceptors; each has to compete with others, to make terms with them; what happens is an integration of complex forces.

It requires therefore a highly technical apparatus of science to discriminate the exact place and nature of a peripheral stimulation, and to trace its normal course to just the junction point where it becomes effective for redirection of activity and thus capable of perception. "Peripheral origin" marks an interpretation of events, a discrimination scientifically valid and important, but no more an original datum than is the spectrum of Betelgeuse. The same thesis holds good, of course, of the "consciousness" corresponding to the centrally initiated processes. To suppose that there are inherently marked off different forms of awareness corresponding to the distinction arrived at by technical analysis is as flagrant a case of hypostatizing as can be found. The theory that certain kinds or forms of consciousness intrinsically have an intellectual or cognitive reference to things present in space is merely the traditional theory that knowledge is an immediate grasp of Being, clothed hi the terminology of recent physiology. While it is offered as if it were established by physiological and psychological research, in reality it presents an intellectual hold-over, a notion picked up from early teachings which have not been subjected to any critical examination; physiology and psychology merely afford a vocabulary with which to deck out an unconscionable survival.

Reference to peripheral stimulation of eye or ear or skin or nose is, whether of the simpler and popular kind or of the more complex neurological kind, part of the technique of checking up the particular sort of extrinsic reference which should be given to an idea; discovery whether it is to be referred to a past, contemporary or future thing, or treated as due to wish and emotion. Even so, ascertainment of mode of stimulation and origin is always secondary and derived. We do not believe a thing to be "there" because we are directly cognizant of an external origin for our perception; we infer some external stimulation of our sensory apparatus because we are successfully engaged in motor response. Only when the latter fails, do we turn back and examine the matter of sensory stimulation. To say that I am now conscious of a typewriter as the source of sensory stimuli is to make a back-handed and sophisticated statement of the fact that I am engaged in active employment of the typewriter to produce certain consequences, so that what I am aware of is these consequences and the relation to them of parts of the typewriter as means of producing them. As matter of fact, we never perceive the peripheral stimuli to which we are at that given time responding.

The notion that these stimuli are the appropriate and normal objects of simple original perceptions represents, as we have just said, an uncritical acceptance by psychologists of an old logical and metaphysical dogma, one having neither origin nor justification within scientific psychology. We are aware only of stimuli to other responses than those which we are now making; we become aware of them when we analyze some performed total act to discover the mechanism of its occurrence. To become aware of an optical or auditory stimulation involved in an act signifies that we now apprehend that an organic change is part of the means used in the act, so that soundness of its structure and working is requisite to efficient performance of the act. I do not usually, for example, hear the sounds made by the striking of the keys; hence I therefore bang at them or strike them unevenly. If I were better trained or more intelligent in the performance of this action, I should hear the sounds, for they would have ceased to be just stimuli and become means of direction of my behavior in securing consequences. Not having learned by the "touch-method," my awareness of contact-qualities as I hit the keys is intermittent and defective. Physiological stimulation of fingers is involved as a condition of my motor response; yet there is no consciousness of contact "sensations" or sensa. But if I used my sensory touch appreciation as means to the proper execution of the act of writing, I should be aware of these qualities. The wider and freer the employment of means, the larger the field of sensory perceptions.

It is usual hi current psychology to assert or assume that qualities observed are those of the stimulus. This assumption puts the cart before the horse; qualities which are observed are those attendant upon response to stimuli. We are observantly aware (hi distinction from inferentially aware) only of what has been done; we can perceive what is already there, what has happened. By description, a stimulus is not an object of perception, for stimulus is correlative to response, and is undetermined except as response occurs. I am not questioning as a fact of knowledge that certain things are the stimuli of visual and auditory perception. I am pointing out that we are aware of the stimuli only in terms of our response to them and of the consequences of this response. Argument as to the impossibility of stimuli being the object of perception is of course dialectical; like all dialectic arguments it is not convincing ff confronted with facts to the contrary. But facts agree. The whiteness of the paper upon which words are being written and the blackness of the letters have been constantly operative stimuli in what I have been doing. It is equally certain that they have not been constantly perceived objects. If I have perceived them from time to time, it is in virtue of prior responses of which they were consequences, and because of the need of employing these attained consequences as means in further action. In the laboratory, as in the painter's studio, colors are specific objects of perception. But as perceived, they are "stimuli" only proleptically and by a shift in the universe of discourse.8 The color now and here perceived, in consequence of an organic adjustment to other stimuli than color, is in subsequent situations a stimulus to other modes of behavior, unconscious in so far as just a stimulus; conscious as far as a deliberately utilized means.

When color is perceived, it is in order to paint, or for matching colors in selection of dress goods, or in an estimate of the harmonious value of the hue of a wall-paper, or for determining from a spectral line the nature of a chemical substance. It signifies that we are responding in such a way as to form or bring into being a stimulus adequate to operate without being perceived. But in the meantime in consciousness it is means to an act which will effect desired consequences. Shall this color be used? Will this particular piece of goods or pattern of wall paper serve the purpose in view? When such questions are determined, a final stimulus is achieved. What is then perceived is either some further consequence, or this consequence as a means in a new predicament, such as wearing the goods, hanging the wall-paper. The consciousness of stimuli marks the conclusion of an investigation, not an original datum; and what is discovered is not the stimuli to that act, the inquiry, but to some other act, past or prospective, and it marks the conversion of de facto stimulus into potential means. The question of stimuli is a question of existential causation; and if Hume's lesson had been learned as well as we flatter ourselves it is learned, we should be aware that any matter of causation refers to something extrinsic, to be reached by inquiry and inference.

We conclude, therefore, that while the word "perception" may be limited to designate awareness of objects contemporaneously affecting the bodily organs, there is no ground whatever for the assumption which has usually attended this narrowing of the older meaning of the word: namely, that sense-perception has intrinsic properties or qualities marking it off from other forms of consciousness. Much less is there justification for the assumption that such perceptions are the original form of elementary awareness from which other forms of cognitive consciousness develop. On the contrary sensory-perceptual meanings are specifically discriminated objects of awareness; the discrimination takes place in the course of inquiry into causative conditions and consequences; the ultimate need for the inquiry is found in the necessity of discovering what is to be done, or of developing a response suitably adapted to the requirements of a situation. When inquiry reveals that an object external to the organism is now operative and affecting the organism, the pertinency of overt action is established and the kind of overt adjustment that should be made is in evidence. Perceptual meanings (sensory-perceptual) contrast with other meanings in that either (a) the latter cannot be overtly acted upon now or immediately, but only at a deferred time, when specified conditions now absent have been brought into being-conceptual meanings-; or (b) that the latter are such that action upon them at any time must be of a dramatic or literary or playful sort- non-cognitive meanings. The necessities of behavior enforce very early in life the difference between acts demanded at once, and those pertinent only at a later time; yet making and refining the distinction is a matter of constant search and discovery, not, as the traditional theory presumes, an original and ready-made affair.

Thus we returned to the statement that apart from considerations of use and history there are no original and inherent differences between valid meanings and meanings occurring in revery, desiring, fearing, remembering, all being intrinsically the same in relation to events. This fact contains in gist the condemnation of introspection.4 It makes no difference in principle whether the introspective doctrine takes a dialectical form, as in the Cartesian-Spinozistic logical realism in which intrinsic self-evidency, clearness, adequacy, or truth, are imputed to some conceptual meanings or ideas; or whether it takes the more usual form of assigning to things appearing in the field of consciousness intrinsic properties which may be read off by direct inspection and thereby used to denominate them as sensory, perceptual, conceptual, imaginative, fantastic, memory, emotional, volitional, etc. It is asserted that in every case, the basis of classification is extrinsic, an affair dependent upon a stady, often hard to make, of generating conditions and of subsequent careers. The denominations are interpretations, and like all interpretations are adequate only when controlled by wide and accurate information as to bodies of fact that are remote and extraneous. It is not too much to say that the introspective doctrine-much wider in logical scope than so-called introspective psychology- is the last desperate stand and fortress of the classic doctrine that knowledge is immediate grasp, intuition, envis-agement, possession. It is this fact which constitutes the importance of the views that have been criticized. Until they have been criticized, until the assumption of immediate intrinsic differences in the meaning-objects of sensory perceptions, reveries, dreams, desires, emotions, has been expelled, the actual relation of ideas to existences must remain an obscure and confused matter.

If one looks at the net results of physiological inquiry upon psychologist insight, one seems bound to conclude that while potentially they are enormous, actually they consist largely in making more emphatic and conspicuous the old metaphysical problem of the relation of mind and body, and in strengthening a leaning to the parallel-istic hypothesis. The explanation is that they have not been used for what they really are: an important part of our scientific resources with respect to the intelligent conduct of behavior in general, and the discrimination in particular of various kinds of meanings from one another. It is one thing to employ, for example, the distinction between central and peripheral origin of the existence of this and that idea as part of the technique of determining their respective cognitive validities, and quite another to assume that ideas and conscious contents are already intrinsically marked off in themselves (and therefore for direct observation or introspection), and that the problem is simply to find physiological equivalents for their distinction. As far as it is assumed that modes of consciousness are in themselves already differentiated into sensory, perceptual, conceptual, imaginative, retentive, emotional, conative (or may be so discriminated by direct inspection), physiological study will consist simply of search for the different bodiiy and neural processes that underlie these differences. The outcome is an exacerbation of the traditional mind-body problem; the doctrine of parallelism, instead of being either a scientific discovery or a scientific postulate, is merely a formulation of the original psychological ready-made distinctions plus a more detailed knowledge of physical existential conditions of their occurrence.

If the problem is put as one of a more adequate control of behavior through knowledge of its mechanism, the situation becomes very different. How should we treat a particular meaning: as sound datum for inference, as an effect of habit irrespective of present condition, as an instance of desire, or a consequence of hope or fear, a token of some past psycho-physical maladjustment, or how? Such questions as these are urgent questions in the conduct of life. They are typical of questions which we must find a way of answering if we are to achieve any method of mastering our own behavior similar to that which we have achieved in respect to heat and electricity, coal and iron. And knowledge of the conditions under which our meanings and our modes of taking and using them organically occur is an indispensable portion of the technique of dealing with such questions. In principle, there is no difference between the neurological inquiry and those astronomical inquiries which enable an astronomer to determine the standing and import of some idea in his universe of discourse. The physiological inquiries no more involve a peculiar problem of mind-body than do the astronomical inquiries. Their subject-matter is part of the objective matter-of-fact considerations which extend and buttress inferential conclusions. In concrete subject-matter, they differ, being concerned with organic structures and processes; but this is only a difference in concrete subject-matter, like that between astronomical and botanical. The peculiar importance of the physiological material is that in some form it enters as a factor into the occurrence of every meaning and every act, including the astronomical and botanical.

We return, accordingly, from this excursion to the assertion that the objects of revery-consciousness are just as much cases of perceived meanings or ideas of events as are those of sensory perceptual consciousness. Only- they are not as good objects with respect to direction of subsequent conduct, including the conduct of knowledge. Revery-consciousness, and the influence upon beliefs of affective wishes of which we are not aware, are facts crucial for any theory of consciousness. If they support the hypothesis that all consciousness is awareness of meanings, they also seem at first sight to contradict the supposition that the meanings perceived are those of natural events. Since their objects are notoriously "unreal," they seem to support the notion that consciousness is disconnected from physical events, and that any valid connection which may be set up, either in practical conduct or in knowing, is adventitious.

There is indeed much to be said for the view that consciousness is originally a dream-like, irresponsible efflorescence, and that it gains reference to actual events in nature only under stern compulsion, and by way of accidental coincidence. There are elements of truth in this view, as against the orthodox tradition which makes consciousness architectonic, having righteous and rational conformity as the corner stone of its structure. Ideas, objects of immediate awareness, are too desultory, fantastic, and impertinent to be consistent with the classic tradition, whether of the sensationalistic or the rationalistic schools. But the view of complete separation of existential consciousness from connection with physical things cannot be maintained in view of what is known of its specifiable connections with organic conditions, and of the intimate, unbroken connection of organic with extra-organic events. It can be maintained only by holding that the connection of consciousness in its varied forms with bodily action is non-natural. The only reason for asserting this position lies in the dialectic compulsion of denial of quality to natural events, and arrogation of superior existence to causal antecedents.

Given the connection of meanings with environmental-organic integrations (including those of social intercourse) and there is nothing surprising that consciousness should often be of the revery and wish type. We find no great occasion for wonder in the fact that a person who has been taught that the sun moves around the earth, rising above it at sunrise and going under it at sunset, should himself hold that belief. Well, past consummatory experiences have taught the individual many things; they have taught him what conjunctions are agreeable and what disagreeable. Just as past teaching regarding sun and earth have conditioned subsequent behavior, have produced organic modifications in the way of habit which influence subsequent reactions, including interpretations, so with what was taught by having been implicated in a consummatory union of environment and organism. Here too a bias in organic modification is set up; it acts to perpetuate, wherever possible, awareness of fruitions, and to avert perception of frustrations and inconvenient interruptions.

A consciousness which is set on the outside over against the course of nature, which is not a partaker in its moving changes, would have to conform to one or other of two schemes. In one alternative, the consciousness of such a being would be gifted with an infallible spectatorship conjoined with perfect innocency of impartial recorder-ship; it would see and report the world exactly as if it were itself knowingly engaged in producing what it saw and reported. Or, in the other alternative, all consciousness would be so completely irrelevant to the world of which it is outside and beyond, that there would be no common denominator or common multiple. Obviously facts do not agree with either of these suppositions. We dream, but the material of our dream life is the stuff of our waking life. Revery is not first wholly detached from objects of purposeful action and belief, coming later by discipline to acquire reference to them. Its objects consist of the objects of daily concern subjected to a strange perspective, perverted in behalf of a bias. Such empirical facts as these, or the fact that the world of fancy is the ordinary world as we like it to be, as we find it agreeable, is fatal to any theory which seriously asserts the wholesale irrelevance of the material of consciousness to the things of the actual world. Irrelevance exists, but it is relative and specifiable. An idea or emotion is irrelevant not as such, through and through, but because it is a version of the meaning of events which if it were differently edited would be relevant to actions in the world to which it belongs.

To par-take and to per-ceive are allied performances. To perceive is a mode of partaking which occurs only under complex conditions and with its own defining traits. Everything of importance hangs upon what particular one of the many possible ways of partaking is employed in a given situation. The organism, wherever possible, participates & son gre; its taste and bias are conditioned, in the degree of its susceptibility and retentiveness, upon prior satisfactions. If a man has experienced a world which is good, why should not he act to remake a bad world till it agrees with the good world which he has once possessed? And if the task of overt transformation is too great for his powers, why should he not at least act so as to get the renewed sense of a good world? These questions express the working logic of human action; the first, the way of objective transformation, is the method of action in the axts and sciences; the second, of action that is fanciful, "wish-fulfilling," romantic, myth-making.

The immense difference between the two modes of action has had to be learned. There is no original and intrinsic difference in the respective modes of consciousness accompanying the two kinds of acts. In some matters, the lesson is readily and quickly learned. Such matters constitute the objects of usual every-day sense-perception, the objects of common-sense. Certain organic-integrations have to occur if life is to continue. Sustenance must be had; destructive enemies must be kept away; the help of others must be availed of. Meanings and ideas connected with these organic-environmental adjustments are substantially sound as far as adjustments are successfully made-and within limits they are ordinarily so made, or life ceases. Such gross ideas as a world of things and persons external to our personal wishes and fancies, and as the continuance of energies once set in motion, are so recurrently and emphatically taught that they are never sincerely doubted. Ideas of specific features of this external world (external to us, since it exacts so much of us in effort before it conforms to the needs that are most deeply ourselves), ideas of fire, food, furniture, weather and crops, of our friends and enemies, and of our own past and probable future, are so repeatedly presented in the connections of actions and so confirmed by consequences that they become matters of course, substantially valid. They thus form a kind of privileged domain, which, although an island in a sea of ideas where ground is not readily touched, has been by too hasty and impatient theories taken to form the original and inherent constitution of consciousness. In consequence, there is added to genuine natural realism which accepts the casual connection of ideas with events and their potential reference to subsequent events, a specious realistic theory which takes the island for a solid and complete continent. Characteristic traits of the whole continent of mind are then looked upon as if they were only incidental faults and dislocations, to be explained away by dialectic ingenuity; or when the strata of fancy, illusion, error and misinterpretation are realized, wholesale scepticism is indulged in.

Gradually the technique involved in making ordinary organic-environmental adjustments is discovered, and becomes capable of extension to cases where fancy had previously reigned. A larger and larger field of ideas becomes susceptible of analytic objective reference, with the promise of approximate validity. The secret of this technique lies in control of the ways in which the organism participates in the course of events. In the case of simple needs and simple environments, existing organic structures practically enforce correct participation; the result is so-called instinctive action. Within this range, modifications undergone by the organism form in the main effective habits. But organic preparation for varied situation having many factors and wide-reaching consequences is not so easily attained. Effective participation here depends upon the use of extra-organic conditions, which supplement structural agencies; namely, tools and other persons, by means of language spoken and recorded. Thus the ultimate buttress of the soundness of all but the simplest ideas consists in the cumulative objective appliances and arts of the community, not in anything found in "consciousness" itself or within the organism.

If any evidence be needed of the artificial character of strictly epistemological discussion it may be found in the fact that it goes on exclusively in terms of an alleged direct contact of "subject" and "object," with total neglect of all the indispensable tools of checking spontaneous beliefs and developing sound ones in their place. Pendulums, lenses, prisms, yard sticks, and pound weights and multiplication and logarithmic tables have a great deal more to do with valid knowing, since they enable the organism to partake with other things in the effecting of consequences, than have bare consciousness or brain and nerves. Without such objective resources to direct the manner of engaging in responsive adaptations, ideas, outside a simple range of constantly tested actions, are at the mercy of any peculiarity of organic constitution and of circumstance; myths are rife and the world is peopled with fabulous personages and is the home of occult forces. Since organic modifications due to past consum-matory objects are dominant, since they lead an individual to find or make a world congenial to them; and since man is most at home with his fellows, whether friends or enemies, the world is then taken animistically for the most part. Too many of the traditional ideas of life, soul, mind, spirit, and consciousness, and of the cosmos itself, even in philosophy, are only attenuated versions of this animism, spontaneous, and often gracious even though fantastic, when men lacked instrumentalities by which to direct their active partakings in nature, but which are now graceless and obstructive.

In conclusion, the fact that consciousness of meanings, or having ideas, denotes an exigent re-making of meanings has an import for the theory of nature. Perceptibility is an exponent of contingency as it intersects the regular. The impossibility of "deducing" consciousness from physical laws, the "impassible gulf" between the physical and mental, are in reality but conspicuous cases of the general impossibility of deriving the contingent from the necessary, the uncertain from the regular. The anomaly apparent in the occurrence of consciousness is evidence of an anomalous phase in nature itself. Unless there were something problematic, undecided, still going-on and as yet unfinished and indeterminate, in nature, there could be no such events as perceptions. The point of maximum apparency is the point of greatest stress and undetermined potentiality; the point of maximum of restless shift, is also the point of greatest brightness; it is vivid, but not clear; imminent, urgently expressive of the impending, but not defined, till it has been disposed of and has ceased to be immediately focal. When philosophers have insisted upon the certainty of the immediately and focally present or "given" and have sought indubitable immediate existential data upon which to build, they have always unwittingly passed from the existential to the dialectical; they have substituted a general character for an immediate this. For the immediately given is always the dubious; it is always a matter for subsequent events to determine, or assign character to. It is a cry for something not given, a request addressed to fortune, with the pathos of a plea or the imperiousness of a command. It were, conceivably, "better" that nature should be finished through and through, a closed mechanical or closed teleo-logical structure, such as philosophic schools have fancied. But in that case the flickering candle of consciousness would go out.

The immediate perceptibility of meanings, the very existence of ideas, testifies to insertion of the problematic and hazardous in the settled and uniform, and to the meeting, crossing and parting of the substantial, static, and the transitive and particular. Meanings, characters as such have that solidity, coherence, endurance, and persistent availability, which our idiom calls substance. Yet were this the whole story, meanings not only would not be perceived, but they would not be meanings. They would be tough operative habits, having their own way not to be denied. Organic movements exist to which there occurred in early life meanings so indurated that now they are habits of an over-riding power; meaning has disappeared in bare behavior. It is possible to understand the regret with which some persons contemplate the passage of thought into act; to them it seems the obsequies of an idea; thought has been dissipated in an outward mechanical sequence. Similarly, one may feel that the important and interesting thing in human history is not what men have done, their successes, but what they failed in doing-the desires and imaginings, forbidden execution by the force of events. Ideas are largely the obverse side of action; a perception of what might be, but is not, the promise of things hoped for, the symbol of things not seen. A fixed idea is no idea at all, but a routine compulsion of overt action, perfunctorily and mechanically named idea.

"Pure reason" would thus not be rational at all, but an automatic habit; a substance so stable and pervading as to have no limits and vicissitudes, and hence no perceptibility. "Pure" reasoning is best carried on by fixed symbols, automatically manipulated; its ideal is something approaching the well-devised mechanically operative calculating machine. Unless nature had regular habits, persistent ways, so compacted that they time, measure and give rhythm and recurrence to transitive flux, meanings, recognizable characters, could not be. But also without an interplay of these patient, slow-moving, not easily stirred systems of action with swift-moving, unstable, unsubstantial events, nature would be a routine unmarked by ideas. Adjustment of the slow moving changes of nature to its sudden starts and trepidations, such as gives some degree of order to the latter and as re-adapts the motions of the sluggish and inert core to the volatile surface of hasty movements, makes necessary a conversion of static orders into stable meanings, while it also renders them perceptible, or ideas, as they answer to the flux of things.

Finally, as psycho-physical qualities testify to the presence in nature of needs and satisfactions, of uneasy efforts and their arrest in some limiting termination, so conscious or conspicuously apparent meanings, ideas, are exponents of the deliberate use of the efficacious in behalf of the fulfilling and consummatory, and of the efficient or instrumental nature of the final. This situation is empirically present to us in the arts, and will be discussed in the immediate sequel. For our immediate purpose, it is enough to point out the difference between the explicit natural teleology of classic metaphysics and the implicit teleology of modern science. In the former, the bare de facto arrests of nature, which often mark merely exhaustion or else limits imposed by competing energies, were by a tour de force assigned eulogistic properties. They were identified with the objects that should be the objects of choice by persons of mature and reflective experience. Thus physics was unwittingly infected by importation of an uncriticized ethic of customary and fixed ends, and of a dialectically ordered hierarchy of fixed means. The identification in modern thought of ends with ends-in-view, with deliberate purpose and planning, of means with deliberately selected and arranged inventions and artifices, is in effect a recognition that the teleology of nature is achieved and exhibited by nature in thinking, not apart from it. If modern theories have often failed to note this implication and have instead contented themselves with a denial of all teleology, the reason is adventitious; it is found in the gratuitous breach of continuity between nature, life, and man.

"This," whatever this may be, always implies a system of meanings focussed at a point of stress, uncertainty, and need of regulation. It sums up history, and at the same time opens a new page; it is record and promise in one; a fulfillment and an opportunity. It is a fruition of what has happened and a transitive agency of what is to happen. It is a comment written by natural events on their own direction and tendency, and a surmise of whither they are leading. Every perception, or awareness, marks a "this," and every "this" being a consummation involves retention, and hence contains the capacity of remembering. Every "this" is transitive, momentarily becoming a "that." In its movement it is, therefore, conditioning of what is to come; it presents the potentiality of foresight and prediction. The union of past and future with the present manifest in every awareness of meanings is a mystery only when consciousness is gratuitously divided from nature, and when nature is denied temporal and historic quality. When consciousness is connected with nature, the mystery becomes a luminous revelation of the operative interpenetration in nature of the efficient and the fulfilling.

1 See the books of Mr. Alexander already referred to, p. 296.

1 Holt, The Concept of Consciousness.

8 The shift is evident in the fact that stimuli are stated as vibrations or electro-magnetic disturbance or in similar fashion; now vibrations are not observed while color the consequence, the effected coordination, is in direct consciousness.

4 It is not asserted that observations called introspection have never given results. It is claimed that in such cases, the procedure does not conform to the theoretical definition of immediate inspection but involves the results of inquiries into relationships with things not directly present.